Kit's Italian Ice

You're three ingredients away from a surefire way to beat the heat!

I know it's all a manner of perspective and what you're used to, but honestly, I can't imagine what it must have been like to live in a time before air conditioning. I don't love being cold or the darkness that comes along with winter, but I do wilt very quickly in high heat, especially when it's humid, so finding ways to keep cool (or just stay in a climate controlled area) are definitely always a priority for me, especially by the time August is rolling around.

(I heard a radio DJ saying that August usually is a cooler month than July, and all I could think of was seriously? Have you ever lived through August before?)

It just so happens that I stumbled upon this recipe in one of my old folders of post ideas and figured hey, why not? Is there a better time of year to have Italian ice than the Dog Days of summer?

Life was certainly different during the Great Depression, and there's no question that summer was a challenging time. Not that it wasn't challenging during the colonial period, or for pioneers, or anyone else in history, but for families struggling to make ends meet, it wasn't exactly easy to make or buy ice cream every single day to help everyone cool down. While movie theaters began getting air conditioning units installed in the 1920's and were a popular place for people to retreat from the heat, that was still off the table or an occasional luxury versus common hobby for plenty of families who needed to make every penny count.

But this recipe seems like something that could be enjoyed by just about anyone... so long as you had a freezer. Americans were able to bring freezers into their homes for the first time in the 1920's and 30's, so it's absolutely possible that Kit and her family or your relatives could have had one even if they were affected by the stock market crash. I'd love to know if my great grandparents had access to a freezer, and wonder if they ever tried out this trick themselves to make home made Italian ice.

One of the first Kit recipes I ever featured on this blog was for pasta and peas, a simple, cheap dinner enjoyed by many Italian Americans during tough times, including my grandma's mom and dad! This recipe came from an article on Business Insider listing some of Depression era recipes of Clara Cannucciari, who shared some of her favorite recipes on her YouTube channel as well. Included in the article is Clara's recipe for Italian ice, which is apparently also known as water ice in the mid Atlantic states.

Italian ice is not a snow cone, nor is it sherbet or ice cream, although it's made similarly to the latter two because it needs to be stirred rather than just being shaved ice with syrup or juice poured over the top. From what I can tell, it seems to be an American invention that was developed by Italian immigrants from Sicily, who adapted their traditional recipes for granitas when they came to the United States. This version is extremely simple, easily adaptable, and only has three basic ingredients, although it can also be made with as few as two. I'm not entirely certain Kit herself would have known about this neat treat, but you can bet there were lots of Italian kids who looked forward to eating this in the middle of the summer.

All you need is two cups of water and half a cup of sugar. This gets heated on high heat until the sugar dissolves, and then you take the mixture off the stove to cool for 15 minutes.

Now, that's literally it. The recipe says that if you want to add flavor, you can squeeze a wedge of lemon or lime, or even add some vanilla extract after it's done freezing. I decided to be a rebel and add the juice of a whole lemon to my mixture after it was done cooling, and then put it in a freezer safe container.

This then gets placed in the freezer for about an hour. According to the recipe, you need to take it out of the freezer and stir it every hour or so for four or five hours, at which point you'll realize the ice is getting harder and harder to stir. I figured those were easy enough instructions to follow, so I put it in the freezer for an hour. When I took it out, it was only just starting to form ice crystals.

I put it in for another hour, and took it out to give it a stir every hour. You can clearly see that the ice crystals get bigger, and it does get more like the consistency of a commercial Italian ice, but after five hours, it still definitely din't have exactly the same solid consistency as a commercial Italian ice.

This wasn't totally shocking to me, as I'm pretty sure the stuff you buy at the grocery store or baseball stadium has thickening agents to help keep it from melting ten seconds after you take it out of the freezer, but I still wasn't sure if I'd really gotten it to the point the recipe wanted me to reach. It specifically said the ice would become more difficult to stir, and while the mixture definitely got more and more icy, it was never especially difficult to stir, and there was always at least some liquid sloshing around on the bottom.

After about seven hours, I finally decided ah well, I'm just going to eat some. Most of it was ice, and it had kind of the same consistency as a slushie or shave ice, one of the ones with big ice crystals instead of the perfect, smooth, wonderful things they serve in Hawaii.

Despite the slight hiccup I ran into in actually getting this frozen - was it because of all the lemon juice I added? or was it always supposed to be a bit slushy? - this was a really pleasant treat to have at the end of the day. It tasted basically exactly like the commercial stuff, but melted much easier in my mouth and was overall refreshing and sweet. I can definitely see how much this would hit the spot on a hot summer day before air conditioning, and as glad as I am that I live in a time and place where that's long in the past, it was still fun to take a look at how people like Kit and my great grandparents might have cooled down in the 1930's.

What's your favorite way to cool down in the summer? Do you have a favorite Italian ice flavor?

We'd love to hear about it!